These two Jewish novelists of the twentieth century explore the devastation caused by the Nazi and Soviet regimes and how individuals try to survive within these oppressive contexts. Grossman’s Life and Fate concerns Viktor Shtrum, a brilliant Soviet Jewish  physicist and mathematician,  who becomes disillusioned with Stalinist Communism even as he participates in the great struggle against Nazi Germany. Filled with a Tolstoyan  array of diverse, colorful characters and historical contexts, Life and Fate is arguably the great twentieth-century Russian novel, although it was only discovered by the West late in the twentieth century. Similarly, Nemirovsky’s Suite Française was only discovered and translated in the 2000s. It documents the beginnings of the Resistance, which Nemirovsky, killed at Auschwitz in 1942, was never to see through to the end. Both novels are monuments to how fiction can emerge from the cruelest and most traumatic circumstances.
Continuing Education Units (CEU) : 0

You'll walk away with

• A familiarity with the works of Vasily Grossman and Irene Nemirovsky
• An understanding of the impact of totalitarian regimes on individuals
• Knowledge about literary representations of historical trauma

Ideal for

• Those with an interest in modern literature
• The curious and creative